Abandon The Flawed Clipper Chip

July 05, 1994

Someone has discovered a fatal flaw in the government's much-ballyhooed encryption system that was supposed to so completely scramble electronic signals that only especially equipped government agents could eavesdrop on telephone and computer users.

A researcher at the AT&T Bell Laboratories has found a way to jam the so-called Clipper chip so that no one can listen in.

AT&T is now the leading producer of the Clipper chip equipment, which was designed to protect phone and computer users from eavesdroppers by scrambling their messages more thoroughly than most presently available commercial encryption programs. But the chip was also supposed to make it possible for authorized government agencies to decode the scrambled transmissions.

The system is supposed to work like this: The built-in Clipper chips would electronically encode all telephone and computer transmissions and decode them at the other end of the line. Callers would understand each other, but most eavesdroppers couldn't. Two separate mathematical ``keys'' would be needed to unlock a built-in electronic back door so the messages could be secretly unscrambled. Two separate govern- ment agencies would hold the keys. It would take a court-approved wiretap order to bring the keys together.

The Clinton administration's request that electronic-equipment manufacturers voluntarily put the chip and related devices in their products is under fire from those who rightly fear Big Brother's eavesdropping. Industrial groups, which say foreign customers won't buy American equipment that Washington can tap, are also opposed.

The Bell Labs' Matthew Blaze has found a way to keep the back door locked -- to prevent the government or anyone else from unscrambling messages. That would leave the Clipper chip no more useful than commercial encryption technology already on the market. Rather than press forward with more and more complex fixes, the administration should abandon this effort to build electronic back doors for government sleuths.